The Modern Library (16 page)

Stephen King has phenomenal storytelling skills, command of popular culture and everyday things, and a brisk sense of humour. He straps his readers to the page, makes their hair stand on end and in imaginative, contemporary prose provides laughter, intelligence and tremendous entertainment.

A Jest of God
is a monologue written in the present tense by a teacher in her mid-thirties who lives with her mother in a fictional town in Canada. Within one or two pages Margaret Laurence creates a complete emotional landscape and a voice which is perfectly pitched, so that the material, which may seem unpromising to certain readers, becomes intensely interesting and memorable.

The progress of Rachel Cameron, her constant fear of her colleagues and her boss, her extraordinary sensitivity to what is going on around her, to each nuance of right and wrong, are described in a way which is exact and real. Her own ability to see all sides, to understand and resist each person she comes in touch with, gives the reader an extraordinary grasp of the world she inhabits. It is a mark of Laurence’s skill as a novelist that she can place Rachel and her mother in a flat above a funeral parlour with regular references to the life and death down below without the reader feeling that this has been added on to the narrative as a way of adding significance to it. Rachel’s summer love affair with an old school friend, which is the dramatic core of the book, is riveting; at times you have to put the book aside for a while, so tense is the emotional atmosphere, so full of challenges and possibilities.
A Jest of God
is a small masterpiece.

In ‘Happiness’, the title story of this volume, the tone is rambling, almost anecdotal, like someone chatting. And slowly then, without you noticing, a picture is built up of a whole personality, a voice, a family, a set of relationships and a past. Mother talks about ‘happiness’, what it is, and how it might be found; she is a widow with daughters living in the Irish countryside. She is visited regularly by a priest; she works in a library and possesses an extraordinary strength which kept her going after her husband died, leaving her a young widow. That experience, the realization that he was going to die, has coloured her life, so that when she too comes to die – by this time the reader is in tears – this is what haunts her. The story is a masterpiece. In another story, ‘The Lost Child’, Mary Lavin manages as much as most novelists manage: a conversion to Catholicism, Renee’s realization that her sister is gay and then the extraordinary graphic account of a miscarriage. There are also moments of pure comedy in some of these stories, as when the priest says to Renee’s gay (and Protestant) sister: ‘You are a man after my own heart, Iris,’ or Annie’s brother in ‘A Pure Accident’ who ‘where he used to think sex was the only difference between a man and a woman, it seemed, now, that maybe it was the only thing they had in common’. Mary Lavin’s work is full of strange wisdom and insight; she writes brilliantly about marriage and children, but also about celibates and outsiders.

Few writers have used the word ‘cold’ as well as John le Carré. He gives it a hundred meanings, all of them intimating the absence of good, and the presence of evil, which erupts when squalid men play games that are unnecessary and vicious, in pursuit of aims corrupt in themselves, useless if achieved. Such autocrats flourished in the chilling moral vacuum the Cold War created from the 1950s to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Modern espionage became our post-war method of warfare, a bitter stamping ground in which spies were instructed that loyalty often meant betrayal.

Such a one is Leamas, about fifty, head of British Command in Berlin, still divided by the Wall. Not a university man, though his spymasters in London – Control – are just that class of English person: right university, right tie, right clubs. Leamas is a tired man, frozen of heart, a failure. Amid an unnerving atmosphere of conspiracy, Control finds a way to send Leamas back for one last attempt to defend the indefensible. Le Carré is a gripping storyteller – spare, ironic, sinewy. He is a master of atmosphere and those dark places of the heart where treachery and tangled moral ambiguities loiter. In this classic novel, full of icy implications and ambiguous truths, he summed up the social and political conditions of an era.

The voice in this novel belongs to Scout, an immensely intelligent, precocious six-year-old girl. Maycomb, her small town in Alabama in the 1930s, is a stable, conservative place which looks as though it will never change – the blacks live at the edge of town. Scout’s mother is dead; she and her older brother Jem are being brought up by their lawyer father, Atticus, who, along with Calpurnia, the black cook, slowly becomes the moral centre of the book. Both adults are portrayed with great, detailed affection, as pillars of society who do not share society’s prejudices, as figures of authority who often seem wilful and hard to understand for the six-year-old narrator, but yet are still never cruel or distant.

At first the novel focuses on the childish games of Scout and Jem and their friend Dill, but slowly the real theme of the novel, which is racial prejudice in the Southern states, emerges. A white woman has accused a black man of rape; it is clear that he is innocent. Atticus becomes his defence lawyer. In the scenes which deal with the accusation and the trial, and the bitterness in Maycomb, and the plight of the accused, the child’s voice becomes morally powerful, and the narrative, especially in the second half of the book, has a compulsive, thrilling force.

There is a triangular love affair at the centre of Rosamond Lehmann’s elegaic novel – but this entanglement conceals much else. Two sisters are in love with the same man. Madeleine is married to Rickie and is the mother of his children. Her sister Dinah is Rickie’s mistress. The place and time are London and southern England in the 1930s and 1940s. Against a backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, Rosamond Lehmann evokes every nuance of the obsession which devours men and women when they love passionately and when loyalties are divided. Time, and outside events, provide the solutions they cannot find for themselves. Lehmann’s narrative art is at its most interesting when contemplating the predicaments of women – comic, painful or embarrassing. But she is also an adventurous writer in style and content, technically innovative, using memory and perspective to expose the many meanings human beings can extract from the past. In this novel she mingles the intricacies of social life with the influence of class, politics and much else, in ways that are both deft and imaginative. Rosamond Lehmann’s subject was the human heart and the inadequacy of men and women pursuing different goals in the name of love. This haunting novel is a classic exploration of that territory in which self, and love, are always lost, always rediscovered.

Leonard views his country as doused in greed, peopled with fools pursuing the endless dollar: what can we do but laugh? His speciality is America’s racial mix, mostly drawn from the bottom of the barrel. In
Get Shorty
, a collection of such persons sashays into Los Angeles, to dabble in the two great American dreams, Hollywood and the Mafia.

There is Chili, hot tempered as a child, coolest of the cool now, debt collector for the Mafia. He encounters the visually challenged film producer Harry Zimm, maker of mutation movies so bad you see ‘better film on teeth’. Then there is Karen the Screamer, Leo the Drycleaner, the Bear, Yayo the Colombian mule, Armani-obsessed Bo Catlett and many others equally lyrically named. Will they achieve their life’s ambition – to get their hands on money (without being killed) by making a movie? This cast of schemeballs entwine the reader in their scams, heists and smart lines.

Though there is a nostalgia here for a time in America when villainy had a sort of innocence, Leonard avoids sentimentality. His genius lies in his idiosyncratic hipster’s prose, amused and inquisitive intelligence and consummate storytelling. This
combination
makes Leonard an addictive peddler of dreams, a writer whose use of dialogue is unsurpassed, who makes you shake with laughter and suspense, and beg for more.

This is one of the most powerful and influential novels of the late twentieth century. Through the experiences of a writer, Anna Wulf, Doris Lessing investigates the moral, intellectual and sexual crises of our age. Anna Wulf is a heroine as vividly imagined as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Anna keeps four notebooks: a black notebook for her writing; a red notebook for politics; a yellow notebook which tells stories; and a blue notebook, her diary and a record of breakdown and
psychoanalysis
. The golden notebook connects each and brings the story full circle. Set in London in the 1950s, the novel is a testament to that decade, with its political tensions and disillusionments, but its centre is Anna’s search for truths which are not simple, which match life itself.

The four notebooks describe the scattered quality of women’s experience: that time of life when a woman is absolutely wrapped up in lovers, husbands, men’s bodies, sex, with a mind always partially elsewhere – with children in particular, and with women friends, ideas, beliefs. And then there is work, usually killed by all the rest of it.

Lessing’s distinctive and original mind, tough and prickly, marches in step with her vigorous way of telling a story.
The Golden
Notebook
, airing all our dilemmas, holds a mirror to our times.